Word: cosmically
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Putting salt on the tail of a cosmic corpuscle which can penetrate 10 centimeters of lead is no mean feat, but Jabez C. Street, assistant professor of Physics, and Edward C. Stevenson, instructor in Physics, have succeeded in doing just that, according to announcements from Jefferson Research Laboratory...
...machine used to trap this elusive iota is known as a cloud chamber. Nothing new, this apparatus has been in use since 1910; it consists of a chamber containing a mixture of liquid and gas and several lead plates, through which the cosmic radiations pass--the gas is cooled, and produces a fog track along the path of ions formed by the charged corpuscles. This track of condensed vapor can be easily seen with the naked eye and also photographed, showing up as a bright streak on the film. Thus electrons, protons and the new particles, although far too infinitesimal...
What got observers Street and Stevenson to thinking that a new sort of corpuscle was in the offing was that the behavior of the cosmic ray particles was not at all like the accepted manner of an electron, which characteristically forms high energy photons, which in turn form more electrons to produce the phenomena known as "electron showers." Due to these showers electrons soon lose their energy, and consequently haven't enough "push" to make much progress through lead. These newly-discovered specks, however, pass through ten centimeters of the metal almost undeviated, with little appreciable loss of energy...
...which tracks made by sub-atomic particles could be seen. At about the same time Hans Geiger, now of the University of Tubingen, invented a cylindrical "counter" which crackles every time a particle enters it. Physicists use both devices, alone or together, to record the presence of and identify cosmic rays, gamma rays, X-rays, photons, electrons, protons, positrons, neutrons...
There is still plenty to be learned about all these forces, but that did not prevent Drs. Jabez Curry Street & Edward Carl Stevenson of Harvard from announcing last week that they had discovered a brand-new cosmic particle which the heavens rain upon the earth. It has a negative electrical charge like an electron, but seems to weigh ten times as much and have a thousand times as much energy, easily passing through four Geiger counters, two cloud chambers and seven inches of lead...